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Mark Computers that come from Google

Is it possible to trap for computers coming to my site off of a Google search? I work for an estore and google caches their sold out items. This causes a customer to go to either the parent category or get a 404 error. So like I said, I would like to trap this kind of incoming traffic and redirect it to a predetermined sold out product page. Any ideas would be appreciated, or some reading on the subject.

You would need to redesign your system. You can't redirect from a 404 because no page exists, unless you want to redirect ALL 404s to some other page (like your home page).

You could use .htaccess as a very general way to redirect, but I don't understand what the rule would be-- you don't want all traffic from google to be redirected, and you don't want all 404 pages to be redirected.

What I suggest would be using a serverside language like PHP to create a dynamic 404 page-- then you can use that page to display several possible messages, like "404" or "Sold out". Or you could redirect them.

Another approach would be to set the proper headers on your product pages, so Google knows not to cache them in the first place. This would require a server-side language (like PHP), or you could set them via .htaccess is your server has mod_headers enabled.

This might take a while to have any noticeable effect (i.e., it wouldn't change what Google has cached now; only what they do in the future), but it would definitely be the preferred solution. Combining this with a dynamic 404/"sold out" page, as Daniel suggests, would be most effective.